Joe Szilagyi

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today will release a new report showing more dramatic health insurance premium increases are proposed in Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington.

The report quotes National Association of Insurance Commissioners officials predicting the nation will “see rate increases of 20, 25, 30 percent.”

From this article, which everyone should read.

I challenge a single conservative to successfully argue that the right of a company to turn a profit is more cherished than the simple human right to have access to medical care. I dare you.

List of nations in North America by 2050-2100:

Canada
Mexico
Cascadia (possibly merged to Canada)
California
New England (including New York)
“The South”
Montana
Various unique, small nations (Dakota, Minnesota, Wyoming, etc.)
Texas (or possibly joining The South)

Here’s how it’ll break down, give or take:

The former American states north and east of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (New York included) have become their own nation. New Hampshire, being New Hampshire, may tell everyone to screw off so that they can continue being New Hampshire. Maybe they’ll name themselves literally “New England”. Fiscally stable and progressive independent nation. Strong commerce. Strong economy. They’d be wise to retain New York as a member of New England for it’s economic, culturarl, and agricultural firepower.

The mid-Atlantics: PA, NJ, MD, DC, places like that–depending on how local state-level elections flow, they could end up anywhere.

The American south will be their own thing. A conservative, religious, red nation, and the beginnings of a Christian theocracy in North America comparable in many ways to Egypt and to a lesser degree Iran. Florida, insanely, will be the liberal corner of their nation. No idea what they’d call themselves. Couldn’t care less.

The American midwest, from Utah, Arizona, Texas, the Dakotas, Wyoming, et all may or may not align in a southern national strip with the south, bordering along Mexico. If they do, I expect nothing less than economic war between Mexico and this new nation.

Illinois and the upper midwest–Michigan, folks out that way–may or may not form their own nation. Some of them would be an ideal fit for annexation with and merger into Canada as new provinces. Illinois in particular may be appealing.

The rest of the massive midwest? Either small independent nations or alignment with their neighbors depending on the prevailing local politics and trends. None will align south with Mexico. With Texas, flip a coin whether they go solo or join the South.

California: it’s own nation.

Oregon, Washington: either our own nation, or merger into Canada. I prefer Cascadia as a national identity, e.g. Cascadians. At the same time, I think Washington and Oregon would do fine as a new province of Canada. God save the Queen?

Montana: it’s own nation, and they’d probably do fine.

Tell me I’m wrong. It’s happened to every single empire in the history of the world: every single, solitary one, since the Romans. We’re at the approximate long end range of longevity right now, for the United States. By 2150 the former United States of America, on a map, will look like modern Europe.

The men who lead the Far Right and American Republican Party at their best. Happy Friday.

The Blackwater Kabul Shooting Case: What Do We Know?

What a shocker… Blackwater USA, an American company founded by a Christian fundamentalist, runs mercenaries across the Middle East. A bunch of heavily armed Blackwater “staff” shoot up a bunch of innocent Iraqis one day, and eventually have the legal case against them tossed on a technicality. Along the way, Blackwater USA renames itself “Xe” to rebrand themselves. Not unlike how AIG is trying to rebrand themselves, I imagine, after AIG almost destroyed the whole of the financial realm in the Western world. Turns out that Xe/Blackwater thugs shot up more people, this time in Afghanistan.

The particulars of what happened last May 5 — including whether the contractors had been drinking and whether they were acting in self-defense — are in dispute, but everyone agrees the shooting occurred after a traffic accident in Kabul.

The charges have attracted attention for coming so soon after a federal judge dismissed a case against Blackwater contractors who allegedly killed 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. That shooting also unfolded after a traffic incident.

The contractors in the Kabul case, Christopher Drotleff, 29, and Justin Cannon, 27, were arrested last week in Corpus Christi, TX, and Virginia Beach, VA, respectively. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

How long until the Obama administration grows up and cuts off all Federal funding for this operation? It seems like their continued employment is not in the political interests of the United States, to put it mildly. If we’re spread so thin with our actual legal military that we need to hire mercenaries, perhaps that a sign that we shouldn’t be still fighting in these countries that the useless Bush administration dumped us into?

Didn’t Fox News say they would institute a zero tolerance policy for lying to viewers by staff in any capacity, intentional or otherwise, after lots of mainstream media finally began calling them on their games last year? Yes, they did. Their memo said:

That means we will start by going to air with only the most essential, basic, and manageable elements. To share a key quote from today’s meeting: “It is more important to get it right, than it is to get it on.” We may then build up again slowly as deadlines and workloads allow so that we can be sure we can quality check everything before it makes air, and we never having to explain, retract, qualify or apologize again.

They were already called out in very public fashion once for falsifying graphics. They played it off as it if wasn’t falsified, playing semantic games. I wonder how they’ll play it off now that someone was caught on-air literally making up stuff as blatant as Rudy Giuliani trying to spin politics by saying there were no domestic terror attacks while George W. Bush was President (it’s more important to slam a black President than be truthful).

What’s the new shameless lie aimed at America? Someone inflating the amount of money that Barack Obama has spent on economic recovery by deliberately padding it with the more unpopular TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout money. More here.

BOLLING: The federal government certainly likes to spend your and my taxpayer dollars. Recently — check it out — they spent $700 billion on TARP, $787 billion on stimulus. Hey, by the way, that stimulus package, those are $400,000 per job — jobs they’re creating. $180 billion is either spent or lent to AIG. Don’t forget the $115 billion — these are all B’s — billion to Fannie and Freddie. $83 billion to cars. We’re not going to see a dime of this. Don’t forget the $1 trillion on health care, cap and trade, et cetera, et cetera. And this one, this one. Can you get a close-up — take a look at this one. $60 billion as of last night going to the unions to buy health care votes.

The problem is that BUSH signed the TARP money away from us–the portion of the economic stimulus that went to parasitic corporate entities like AIG–not Obama. I’m guessing by the time the 2012 elections roll around we’ll be saying that Obama was responsible for invading Iraq and the 9/11 attacks on New York City, at this rate.

Odds that Bolling gets anything more than a some laughs with everyone over at the Fox News coffee room over this rather than disciplined, reprimanded, or terminated as the previous internal memo implied he would?

Publicola posted a funny little irony the other day that I just noticed:

Last week, state Attorney General Rob McKenna editorialized on the Seattle Times op-ed page against planned state employee raises, co-writing (along with three other state GOP leaders): “Taxpayers should … be spared from funding $83 million in planned pay raises for 21,000 state workers.”

He was referring to a state employee incentive program known as “step increases.”

But last year, according to a recent report from the state’s Department of Personnel, McKenna himself gave nearly $600,000 in performance-based incentives (part of the step increase program) to 901 of his 1321 employees. That’s 68 percent of his staff.

Odds that someone in the mainstream media calls this out? 10:1? 10,000:1?

Banned in China: what the regime doesn’t want its people to see – Telegraph Blogs

In case you had no idea what China bans it’s one billion people from seeing:

1. Photos of of the Tiananmen Square massacre of civilians.
2. Photos of tortured Falun Gong members.
3. Searches related to Tibet, Tiananmen, democracy, rights, and privacy.
4. Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. Friendster. Many online games or game-like systems.
5. iTunes store and similar stores. Many iTunes apps are filtered out by China.
6. Western news sources (most).
7. Wiki-type open editing sites (such as Wikipedia).

More details here, and that’s just the stuff we know about. Even more:

To be an effective asshole and general burden to decent society, one may wish to follow the lead of one Steve King, a Republican Morlock from Iowa:

“This sounds to me like open borders advocates exercising the Rahm Emanuel axiom: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said in an e-mail message to ABCNews. “Illegal immigrants from Haiti have no reason to fear deportation but if they are deported, Haiti is in great need of relief workers and many of them could be a big help to their fellow Haitians.”

There’s no better time to play up the political douchebaggery than when an entire society hangs on the needle’s edge of total human suffering with the streets literally piled with the bodies of their dead family members.

Warning: if you’re not from Seattle you won’t care about this. Even if you are, you probably won’t.

I wrote about who I wanted to win the local Seattle elections this year and how I did on my predictions–Six for six!–before. But if you want some evidence of why one of them was a seriously good pick, read this article on The Stranger about the supposed fallout from the new City Attorney, Pete Holmes, cleaning house. The voters spoke. These professionals need to deal with it and move the on. If some of these city attorneys did get replaced for their parts in unpopular actions that voters rejected, that’s how the political cookie unfortunately crumbles. The lesson is that if you do stuff that basically pisses off a politically active base of voters, and they vote your boss out, odds are you’ve been voted out as well.

A complete posting of the letter is here, which is even funnier. One of the complaints about Holmes:

The Draconian use of fear and subterfuge to try to pacify this Division will not make one who is unqualified an effective leader.

Not unlike how the ‘old’ City Attorney governance model was to use Draconian fear against the Seattle nightlife culture?

Just in case you weren’t aware of it, she was indeed a complete raging idiot whose contributions to intellectual thought and theory are exactly on par with that of the great spiritual leader that warned us of the dangers of disembodied alien energy creatures and galactic space overlords that haunt us today after our ancestors failed to blow them up in a volcano laced with hydrogen bombs.

In other words, the tenets of Objectivism are complete hedonistic bullshit and a license for deeply selfish people to piss upon their neighbors. Her teachings if you strip out all the crap that is strategically designed to make it look ‘good’ boils literally down to survival of the fittest and the belief that sheer unadulterated selfishness is a virtue. If Scientology’s belief system is basically a shitty Doctor Who plot from 1971, then Objectivism is basing society’s moral code on Survivor’s All-Star Season. Also, fuck John Galt.

A Washington state Senator from one of our southern counties wants to stop development of a mass transit rail system across Interstate 90’s floating bridge. You see, if you’re not familiar with our geography, we have a conundrum in Washington. It’s called water. The King County area is basically split up repeatedly by lakes, bays, harbors, and rivers–click on this link for an idea of how crazy it can be (Google Maps). See how that route goes east out of Seattle, across that massive lake? That’s I-90. Our bridges, built to float across these massive bodies of still water, are major traffic choke points for West-East commuters. The Eastside of that lake is quickly approaching almost Seattle-levels of development and population, so we need robust mass transit across both ways.

For some reason, this daffy politician from way down South, in the completely opposite direction 88 miles away, is against the idea. His bill boils down to:

A light rail system or any other rail fixed guideway system may not be constructed or operated on the Interstate 90 floating bridge.

Why is this laughably clueless? As my first link points out, the construction and transit work is already paid for by the Federal government to the tune of $900,000,000. It’s apparently important enough that this massive expansion was paid for by the US Government as an important need. We’d also have to pay back the money with interest and a loss if we don’t build the train system. Stupid and harmful to Washington state? Very much so. Thankfully, it will probably be dead on arrival in Olympia.

Feingold wary of upcoming ruling on campaign finance | htrnews.com | Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter

In case you weren’t aware, we’re getting close to a possible Supreme Court ruling that could basically destroy the value of campaign finance laws in America, and allow corporations to funnel potentially unlimited amounts of money from their treasuries into political election campaigns. This is singularly horrible and frightening.

Citizens United, an independent group, has challenged an FEC ruling that prohibited the group from airing a documentary on 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton titled “Hillary: The Movie.” The FEC said the group, which received corporate donations, could not run the documentary because it advocated the defeat of a political candidate within 60 days of a general election. The group had intended to air the documentary via a video-on-demand service.

Citizens United contends the FEC ruling violated the group’s freedom of speech and that McCain-Feingold’s electioneering communications provision regarding disclosure and funding is unconstitutional.

The implications of letting corporations do this are terrible. Russ Feingold summed it up:

Our elections would become like NASCAR races – underwritten by companies. Only in this case, the corporate underwriters wouldn’t just be seeking publicity, they would be seeking laws and policies that the candidates have the power to provide.

This will, if it happens, open the door for further Constitutional challenges for any person or group to pump unlimited money into politics and will put America’s future firmly on sale. I refuse to live in an America owned by the Catholic Church, Wal-Mart, and Exxon. If things slide this way I would honestly seriously consider emigrating to Canada or Europe. Seriously. The strict Constitutionalist trash on the Supreme Court, if they allow this to go through, will become literal enemies of the state in my mind.

Campaign finance restrictions have to exist so that no one group wields too much power over the process and is at least attempted to be held in check. Without that, America will die in the end.

It looks like even our geographically cloistered corner of the nation isn’t immune to the fun times that is the Tea Bagging political movement. You have to read these completely demented bills Republicans have in the first two days of our new session introduced to the Washington State legislature. Snippets of a complete lack of understanding of how things like states’ rights, the nature of the US Federal government, and the very existence of the United States exists. All because (as this site points out) local Republicans are scared the Tea Baggers may target them next for political termination for not being completely raving lunatic anti-government ultra-Right fundamentalists.

Replace Federal paper currency in Washington with gold and silver coins:

…restore gold and silver money in accordance with the Constitution, then phasing out the Federal Reserve System and its inflationary paper money, the Federal Reserve Note.

And my favorite, get into a shooting war (?) with the Federal government if they try to take and use any Federal tax funds taken from Washingtonians:

…all federal taxes be remitted to the state, and held in escrow, and includes the rather startling threat that any action by the feds against a WA citizen for complying with the act (you know, like not paying the IRS your taxes) would be considered a “hostile and unconstitutional action against Washington state and its citizens,” against which the state would take “all necessary measures.”

Yes, let’s start a second Civil War. Sounds like a brilliant plan.

Who exactly didn’t see this one coming?

Just as dealings with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats soured last summer, six of the nation’s biggest health insurers began quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress.

That money, between $10 million and $20 million, came from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint, according to two health care lobbyists familiar with the transactions. The companies are all members of the powerful trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans.

The funds were solicited by AHIP and funneled to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to help underwrite tens of millions of dollars of television ads by two business coalitions set up and subsidized by the chamber. Each insurer kicked in at least $1 million and some gave multimillion-dollar donations.

No, seriously, who didn’t see this happening? This is exactly why there needs to be clear legal requirements with criminal penalties–not just financial, CRIMINAL–that such paid-for shilling political speech be attributed back to whomever is paying for it. This is shameless deception, where they tried to make it look to the public like they themselves weren’t paying for advertisements full of misstatements designed solely to upset uninformed people (see: Tea Party) and enhance the success of their businesses interests. It would be a tragic waste if the Justice Department didn’t investigate them fully because of this, to prosecute any and all laws that may have been potentially violated here.

Sarah Palin to Contribute to Fox News – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com

Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has signed on as a contributor to the Fox News Channel. The network confirmed that Ms. Palin will appear on the network’s programming on a regular basis as part of a multi-year deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.

What a completely unsurprising turn of events, that Palin is now going to be a pundit on Fox News. What, again, are her qualifications for any of this? She’s a pseudo-religious political bobblehead figure for the Tea Party crowd and ultra-Right to latch onto. Yes, she was Governor of Alaska (briefly). Yes, she was selected without much vetting to be a Vice-Presidential candidate.

The most frightening thing here is how she’s either being maneuvered, or in turn is maneuvering herself, for a full Presidential run in 2012. While the sheer comedy of her trying to debate Barack Obama live on television would be a joy, and would give us absolutely killer comedy throughout the campaign–they couldn’t keep her isolated from the press as a full candidate unlike the nonstop trainwreck of McCain’s campaign–the possible end result is terrifying.

The absolute last thing we need is a fundamentalist religious personality in the White House. Especially, God forbid, one who as evidenced in the 2008 campaign cycle wasn’t even aware of what little things like the Bush Doctrine were, or what the Cold War meant. It would be like having our own Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the White House, but a Christian lady instead of a Muslim man. We’d be the laughingstock of the world, if some random country like Mexico didn’t just invade us to put us out of our misery.

For a good review on the value of Palin as a contributor and journalist (or the lack thereof) read this article here. It goes on and on and on at exhaustive length on Palin’s accuracy.

For the curious, the Federal legal challenge to California’s bill to ban gay marriage, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, is underway as of today. If you’re Twitter inclined, you can follow updates here on my prop-8-trial list (simple, easy) or for the insane and ADD inclined, live real-time search on the Twitter #prop8 hash. Whatever happens here, it’s an absolutely foregone conclusion it will go up to the United States Supreme Court for basically two Federal trials on homosexuality. Completely ridiculous.

The special election for Ted Kennedy’s Senator vacancy is next week in Massachusetts. Having lived nearly my entire life “next door”, I’ll be shocked if the Republican they threw to the wolves in this election actually manages to beat Coakley, the Democratic nominee. This is TED KENNEDY’s seat. He was beloved up there. He was the last of the Kennedys in politics in a real way. Yes, I know some polls and the news media are making it out like some sort of epic duel right now, but I think this is horse crap. Why? The mainstream news media and most polling companies:

1. No longer tell the truth, they tell a story that gets you back for more. 
2. Are highly partisan. Ever notice how Fox & Rasmussen polls always seem to favor Conservatives?
3. It’s Massachusetts.
4. It’s the most liberal place in North America possibly beside San Francisco.
5. It’s the hand off from the Kennedy family to whatever is next from up there in New England.
6. Mitt Romney is more likely to win this election, he’s not even running, and his mainstream political career is functionally done.
7. Nate Silver agrees.

This is a really good article discussing this.

Restrictions on health care availability are an effective form of social control. We often talk about this in terms of women’s health care. But too often lost in the health care debate is the broader truth:  health care is used as a weapon of control. In a certain sense, we can be healthy or we can be truly free. So much for Patrick Henry.

Amazing, that it’s been already one year since hatred and improper out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Mormon extremists conned California into rejecting equal civil rights via Proposition 8. The fact that civil rights, or any human rights, are something that can be voted on is a whole other filthy mess that needs to be legally challenged up to our Supreme Court level. At least in Washington state, when the hatred of Referendum 71 was presented–similar to California’s Proposition of hate–our state voters smartly and overwhelming rejected it despite more out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Christian extremists from Oregon and other areas.

The people of Maine were not so fortunate, where it was reported that some Catholic churches conducted secondary collections to help fund anti-gay voting.

Like women’s rights and interracial marriage, delegating the question of equality to the whims of the state level are fundamentally flawed and unethical. Like what happened with abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the rights of blacks to marry whites in Loving V. Virginia in 1966, I’m thinking this won’t end until someone can challenge it to the Supreme Court. You simply don’t vote on “rights”. The biases of any religion cannot be allowed to affect the lives of all your other citizens who don’t follow that religion, full stop.

It’s gotten so bad now one year later with dangerous religious extremism trying to sway American legal destiny that the Catholic Church announced it would terminate all charity work in our nation’s capital if Washington D.C. legalized gay marriage locally, in revenge.

We’re now getting closer daily to the desires of the far Right for concepts like dominionism and Christian doctrine to be our version of an American Sharia law. Both ideals are patently dangerous, wrong for a secular multi-cultural nation like ours, and frankly evil if imposed on everyone who doesn’t subscribe to those limited precepts. If it happens, our nation is pretty much doomed to become the next Iran.

There were nationwide protests a year ago this weekend, where millions of people opposed the religious hatred and civil rights violations last year in California. These were my photos from the Seattle protests:

…is how I am so far, barring any last minute changes to election results, in the local Washington state and City of Seattle elections. I called and voted:

§ Initiative 1033: Oppose
This was our horrific TABOR anti-taxation extremist mess that would have basically eviscerated all of state and local governments within years; the act of anti-tax wingnuts spitting in society’s eye.

Tonight: I-1033 got it’s ass rightly kicked. Horrible idea.

§ Referendum 71: Support
This was an attempt launched initially by a church in Oregon–OREGON–to undo Washington’s laws that grant legal rights and protections to domestic partnerships, because our state decided to extend those protections to same-sex couples. What the hell gives the churchgoing a right to dictate the legal rules that govern the rest of us? This is 2009, not 1009.

Tonight: R-71 appears to be comfortably passing, as Washington State residents endorse civil rights and reject the rule of a minority of foreign Oregon fanatics.

§ Housing Levy: Support
This was our city-level measure to continue funding for expansion and maintenance of low-income housing.

Tonight: Easy win.

§ King County Executive: Dow Constantine
The guy matches expected and traditional King County morals, standards, ethics, and ideals. His opponent, not exactly.

Tonight: Dow pretty much kicked his opponent’s stealth conservative ass, making months of “ZOMG SKYS FALLING!!!” local polls pointless.

§ Seattle City Attorney: Pete Holmes
His opponent was basically at ideological odds with possibly the entire populace of Seattle, aged 18-35, and often seemed to be proud of the fact. He’s absolutely entitled–he was the elected City Attorney, and I have to say he had a massive pair of brass balls to be that way in this city.

Tonight: Pete Homes is our new City Attorney, now, by a 3-1 voting margin, the last I saw.

§ Seattle Mayor: Mike McGinn
McGinn is up 50%-48% as of tonight, a difference of thousands of votes. This will take several days to shake out.

Tonight: I hate photo finishes. I’m calling it for McGinn.

Edit: Wow, I’m good at math. I posted this as “five for five” at first.